Nitsana Darshan-Leitner — Op-eds

Thirty-One Years Late Is Better Than Never — But the Mullahs Must Still Pay

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 06:39:15 GMT

On July 18, 1994, a bomb-laden van was driven into the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires and detonated. Eighty-five people were killed and more than 300 were wounded — the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history. For thirty-one years, the mullahs in Tehran watched the investigation spiral into corruption and cover-ups and concluded, correctly, that there was no price to be paid. That calculation just changed.

Federal Judge Daniel Rafecas has ordered ten Iranian and Lebanese suspects to stand trial in absentia, including former Iranian Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahijan, former Foreign Minister Ali Velayati, former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezai, and Hezbollah operative Salman Raouf Salman. Each defendant now carries a $500 million lien. The court called the attack a "crime against humanity" ordered by the highest echelons of the Iranian regime and executed by its Lebanese proxy. That verdict — even in a pretrial ruling — is a legal stake through the heart of Tehran's thirty-year denial.

The road here was littered with sabotage. A federal judge was removed in 2005 for "serious irregularities" in handling the case. Then, in January 2015, special prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead from a gunshot wound the night before he was scheduled to present findings alleging that the Kirchner government had conspired to cover up Iranian involvement and negotiate immunity for the very suspects now facing trial. The prisoners always get paid — and so, it seems, do those who protect them.

What changed? Argentina under President Javier Milei passed Law No. 27.784 in March 2025, permitting trial in absentia for the first time. A government that calls morality a state policy built the legal architecture to use it. The Buenos Aires Federal Appeals Court confirmed Rafecas's ruling this week.

The $500 million liens are a start, not a finish. My work at Shurat HaDin has taught me that a court order without enforcement is a piece of paper. The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the European Union must move immediately to freeze and seize Iranian sovereign assets wherever they can be reached. Washington and Brussels should also enforce the INTERPOL Red Notices that the named suspects have flouted on more than twenty international trips since 2007.

The AMIA bombing was not an isolated act of rage. Two years before AMIA, a truck bomb struck the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people and wounding more than 200. One regime, one proxy, one pattern — and the same deliberate impunity. Terror is a financial enterprise. Make it ruinously expensive, and it stops.

Eighty-five people went to their community center on a Monday morning and never came home. They deserve more than a ruling. They deserve a bill that gets collected.

Sanction the ICC Into Submission — and Watch Impunity Collapse With It

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 07:09:15 GMT

The International Criminal Court built its 2024 arrest warrants for Israeli leaders on a foundation of invented jurisdiction. Neither Israel nor the United States is party to the Rome Statute. Neither country has ever consented to the court's authority. That legal fact alone should have closed the file. Instead, the ICC pressed forward — and now it is about to learn that financial consequences are real even when legal ones are disputed.

Reports this week confirm that the Trump administration is preparing to sanction the ICC as an institution, not merely its individual judges and prosecutors. The proposed measures would prohibit most transactions with the court after a grace period of six to seven months, effectively severing it from the US dollar system. Banks, which routinely over-comply with sanctions to protect their own access to American finance, would treat the ICC as untouchable. The experts calling this a "doomsday scenario" for the court are right — and that is precisely the point.

This escalation did not come from nowhere. President Trump signed an executive order in February 2025 declaring a national emergency, blocking the assets of ICC officials, and suspending their entry into the United States. The order was grounded in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the American Servicemembers' Protection Act of 2002 — real statutes, not improvised weapons. Washington then sanctioned more than a dozen ICC judges and prosecutors, including the court's president, Tomoko Akane, and former chief prosecutor Karim Khan. The court kept coming. So now the institution itself goes on the list.

The ICC's defenders will call this an attack on international justice. I call it the correct application of financial pressure against an institution that chose political theatre over legal legitimacy. In my work at Shurat HaDin, I have spent years arguing in U.S. federal courts that money is the decisive lever — that you make terrorism, and the structures that enable it, too expensive to sustain. The same logic applies here. A court that manufactures jurisdiction to pursue democracies must be made to feel the cost.

The Europeans wringing their hands about the EU Blocking Statute should ask themselves a harder question: why did they allow an unaccountable tribunal to pursue allies, accumulate political capital from those prosecutions, and only now scramble for cover? Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been explicit — the court will be dismantled "brick by brick" if it does not retreat from its overreach. That is not a threat; it is a schedule.

The court has investigations in Darfur, Libya, Myanmar and Ukraine. Those can continue under a reformed institution with actual jurisdiction. What cannot continue is a regime that treats a democratic ally's elected leaders as equivalent targets to war criminals from states that have consented to prosecution. The ICC made that choice. Washington is now pricing it accordingly.

The Durban Libel Is 25 Years Old — and the UN Is Celebrating It

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 06:19:15 GMT

The charges of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide filling today's university quads and UN resolutions did not emerge from the rubble of Gaza. They were minted in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001 — and on September 28, the United Nations will convene in New York to mark the 25th anniversary of that founding act of organized hatred.

I have spent my career following the money behind terrorism. What was assembled at Durban was terrorism's legal-political twin: a structured operation to destroy a state not with bombs but with language. The World Jewish Congress was right to call it a "hallmark of antisemitism and anti-Zionism."

The fix was in before a single delegate arrived. The Islamic Republic of Iran chaired the preparatory meeting in Tehran and barred Israeli and Jewish organizations — effectively after their last flight had left Paris. In their absence, delegates produced language accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and racial superiority doctrine. The conference's final declaration condemned one country. The parallel NGO Forum — 7,000 activists — called for the "complete and total isolation of Israel" and demanded reinstatement of the 1975 Soviet-backed resolution equating Zionism with racism, which the General Assembly had already revoked in 1991.

The conditions at that forum were obscene. Vendors sold the Protocols of the Elders of Zion openly; pamphlets circulated bearing Hitler's photograph asking "What if I had won?" The Roma caucus walked out and condemned the text as antisemitic. Holocaust survivor Congressman Tom Lantos called it "the most sickening display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period." Former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler called it the "tipping point for the laundering of antisemitism at the U.N."

Representatives of 1,500 organizations adopted the NGO Declaration as a platform for boycotts and sanctions. The ADL has documented how Durban laid the groundwork for BDS, formalized in 2004–2005. The NGO network has since metastasized: NGO Monitor identified 157 U.S.-based groups linked by nearly 3,000 funding and partnership connections, and in Britain 80% of anti-Israel protests since October 7 were organized by NGOs with documented links to Iran, Hamas or Hezbollah.

The Durban NGO Declaration called for a "war crimes tribunal" to try Israel. South Africa obliged: on December 29, 2023, less than three months after the October 7 massacres, it filed a genocide case at the ICJ. The playbook written in those tents in Durban is now being executed in The Hague. Thirty-eight countries boycotted the 20th-anniversary event in 2021. Every democracy should stay home on September 28 — and say loudly why.

A Medical School Told Jewish Students That Yom Kippur Was Not an Excuse

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 07:29:15 GMT

There is a particular species of discrimination that dresses itself up as neutral policy. Lincoln Memorial University's DeBusk College of Osteopathic Medicine in Harrogate, Tennessee, practiced it with textbook precision — and got caught.

The facts, as established by a joint federal investigation, are not complicated. According to the Justice Department, during the 2025–26 academic year the medical school denied Jewish students' requests to reschedule classes, exams and academic assignments for religious holidays while granting identical requests from non-Jewish students. When the Jewish students pushed back, the school's response was audacious: it adopted a January policy that banned excused absences for religious observances altogether — while preserving them for "professional student leadership obligations" and other secular reasons. The message could not have been clearer: your holidays are not our problem.

That is not neutrality. That is a policy written to keep a specific people in their place while offering every other student a calendar exemption. The DOJ investigation, opened in February, invoked Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act — federal laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Antisemitism, the department correctly noted, can constitute discrimination on the basis of national origin.

I have spent decades litigating for terror victims in U.S. federal courts and have learned that behind every act of antisemitic discrimination — however bureaucratic it appears — there is a system that tolerates it, and a culture that permits it to grow. The settlement reached this week demands the medical school reverse all penalties against Jewish students, revise its absence policy, and educate every administrator, professor, and staff member about what the law requires. That is a start. It is not enough to stop there.

What happened in Harrogate is not isolated. This administration has reached a parallel agreement with Northwestern University requiring $75 million in payments and mandatory antisemitism training after a hostile educational environment was allowed to fester on campus. The legal tool is the same in both cases: federal funding. Institutions that take federal money are obligated to obey federal civil rights law. When they don't, the money should stop and the lawsuits should start.

To every dean and provost now reviewing their own absence policies: the DOJ is watching, and so are we. Jewish students in America are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for the same treatment — the same treatment that every other student at DeBusk College apparently already had. That is not a demand. That is the law.

The UN Funds "Human Rights Education" — Taught by Hostage-Takers

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 07:34:15 GMT

Last month, at the 63rd Session of the UN Human Rights Council — a panel dedicated, with characteristic UN irony, to human rights education — a woman named Neta Heiman Mina stood up and asked the assembled delegates a question none of them wanted to answer. Her mother, Ditza, was 84 years old when Hamas kidnapped her from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023. For 48 days, an UNRWA teacher named Abed kept Ditza trapped in his attic with very little food. The question Neta put to the Council: how can the United Nations place the education of Gaza's next generation in the hands of a man like that?

It is a question that answers itself — if you are willing to look at the record.

Israeli intelligence found that at least 12 UNRWA employees participated in the October 7th attack, including six who took part in the invasion, two who held hostages, and others who transported ammunition. Of those 12, seven were teachers. The audio recordings leave nothing to the imagination: one UNRWA teacher and PIJ operative was captured saying, "I'm inside with the Jews." Another, a Hamas operative, announced: "We have female hostages. I captured one."

And then there is Suhail al-Hindi. For years he served simultaneously as UNRWA school principal and chairman of the UNRWA Gaza staff union — the man in charge of 8,000 teachers. UNRWA suspended him briefly in 2011 for meeting with Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, then watched him get re-elected union chairman. In 2017, UNRWA finally pushed him out — not for being a Hamas member, but because he had just been elected to the Hamas Politburo, alongside Yahya Sinwar. He had been on UNRWA's payroll for 27 years.

I have litigated terrorism cases in U.S. federal courts where judges ruled there is no such thing as a lone wolf. Behind every terrorist stands a whole system that incites, indoctrinates, equips and funds them, and takes care of their families afterward. UNRWA, as constituted in Gaza, is part of that system.

Neta also said something that deserves to be heard: the vacuum must be filled. Gaza's children need food, medicine and education — and Israel should support genuine alternatives to deliver them. The moral imperative is not to end humanitarian aid. It is to ensure that aid is never again routed through an agency whose teachers moonlight as jailers.

Donors who keep writing the cheques are not funding education. They are funding the system that put an 84-year-old woman in an attic.

Iran's AI Spy Ring Is Coming for Us — and the Clock Is Running

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 07:53:07 GMT

For years I have stood in courtrooms arguing that terrorism does not begin with a bomb. It begins with a list — a target list, assembled by human hands, refined over months, turned into an order of battle. What Anthropic's new threat-intelligence report reveals is that Iran has now outsourced the most labor-intensive part of that process to a machine.

Anthropic, the San Francisco company behind the Claude chatbot, confirmed this month that it identified and shut down an Iran-nexus threat actor it designated GTG-30004. The operatives used Claude to build an automated open-source intelligence system — a profiling harness — that took a pre-existing target list of Israeli governmental and non-governmental figures, and members of the Jewish diaspora, and enriched it at machine speed. What used to require teams of Iranian Intelligence analysts working for months, this system did in hours. Hundreds of individuals were profiled. Their identities, affiliations, vulnerabilities — assembled, organized, and delivered as intelligence products, ready for the next step.

The next step is the part that should keep every Jewish community leader awake at night.

The same actor, the same Iran-nexus group, was simultaneously modifying an open-source credential-stealing tool called NanoDump and building a custom C++ obfuscation pipeline designed to hide their malware from security analysts. Surveillance and cyberweapons in one hand; a dossier on you in the other. And a second Iranian actor — tracked by Anthropic as GTG-30005 — was using Claude to compile targeting handbooks against U.S. naval forces and to design a domestic mass-surveillance platform combining license-plate recognition with mobile-device interception. This is not dabbling. This is an integrated intelligence program, running in parallel workstreams, powered by an American company's product.

Let me be precise about what "automated" means here, because the word is doing a great deal of work. Anthropic's report documents that Iranian operators fed Claude batches of social-media posts — in one surveillance operation, over 155,000 posts on X — and directed the system to produce structured records identifying targets' locations, demographic data, and political leanings, complete with confidence scores. Separately, a Qom-based Iranian unit built a malicious Firefox extension — named "al-Najm al-thāqib" — that mass-harvested user identities from major social networks. Both units fed their collection into the same centralized Iranian state case-management system. Iran has built a factory. AI is the assembly line.

The ayatollahs' use of AI to hunt their enemies abroad is consistent with everything we know about how they operate. I have represented families of Iranian Jews kidnapped while trying to flee the country. I know firsthand what it looks like when the regime decides someone belongs on a list. The execution of Habib Elghanian in 1979 — accused of "corruption" in a sham one-hour trial and shot by firing squad — was the regime's announcement that every Jew in Iran was a potential target. The automated profiling of diaspora Jews in 2026 is the same logic, scaled and exported. The names change. The principle does not.

Anthropic deserves credit for publishing its findings and banning the accounts involved. The company also said it shared information about the activity with government authorities and other organizations. But let us be honest about what banning an account accomplishes: it raises the cost of the operation by approximately the time it takes to create a new one. Anthropic's own report documents Iranian actors returning to Claude within hours of a disruption, or routing through VPNs and fraudulent accounts to regain access. The regime is persistent. Platform bans are a speed bump, not a wall.

The real remedy, as it always is with Iran, runs through money and law. Every Iranian paramilitary unit and domestic-security agency whose operatives ran these operations — Anthropic identified them as linked to Iranian paramilitary and domestic-security agencies — is a sanctionable entity. The U.S. Treasury Department and the European Union should be moving now to designate the specific organizational nodes identified in this report. Freeze the accounts of the officials who directed these operations. Sanction the procurement networks that buy the access.

Beyond sanctions, American lawyers should be examining whether the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 and the Antiterrorism Act of 1990 open a path to civil suits on behalf of the targeted Israelis and diaspora Jews. The profiling of individuals as a preparatory step for a potential attack is not abstract surveillance — it is the reconnaissance phase of a targeting cycle. When that targeting cycle has previously resulted in violence, as it did in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and wounded more than 300, the legal theory writes itself.

There is one more demand that must be made clearly, of the AI companies themselves. Anthropic did the right thing by publishing this report. But the industry as a whole has treated national-security misuse as a content-moderation problem — a matter of better prompts and faster bans. It is not. It is a sanctions-compliance problem, a know-your-customer problem, a question of whether a company selling access to a powerful intelligence capability has the same obligations as a bank selling access to the financial system.

Iran has answered that question for us. It treated Claude as infrastructure. We should govern it accordingly.

The PA's Election Rules Just Confessed Everything About Pay-for-Slay

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 06:48:28 GMT

There is a particular kind of arrogance that only a regime certain of its own impunity can afford — the kind that puts its most nefarious policies in writing, in a routine bureaucratic circular, and dares the world to notice.

The Palestinian Authority has just done exactly that.

Ahead of upcoming PA local elections, the PA Central Elections Commission issued guidance on who must resign before submitting a candidacy application. The answer, according to commission spokesman Fareed Taamallah, is straightforward: any PA employee who "holds a position, receives his salary from the state, and is currently engaged in his work is required to resign from his position." Give up your job. Give up your paycheck. Then you may run.

Taamallah was equally clear about who faces no such requirement. The exemptions include retirees, prisoners, the wounded — that is, the two categories of terrorists on the PA payroll — and recipients of social benefits. A nurse, a teacher, an engineer who draws a salary from the PA bureaucracy must forfeit that income to seek elected office. A man imprisoned for murdering Israelis, or wounded while carrying out an attack against them, pockets his terror stipend and files his candidacy papers without a second thought.

Read that twice. The Palestinian Authority has encoded into its election law a privilege for terrorists that it explicitly denies to its own civil servants.

This is not a slip. It is not an oversight. It is the logical consequence of a program that Mahmoud Abbas declared finished — and then continued under different labels, different budget lines, different agency names. According to a February 2026 analysis by Palestinian Media Watch, the PA will distribute $315 million this year to 23,500 terrorists and their families, funneling the payments through its security forces, civil service payroll, and pension office — precisely to fool Western donors who conditioned their money on the program's abolition. More than 10,000 former inmates receive monthly stipends of between roughly $1,280 and $3,800 each. An additional 6,000 terror-reward recipients have had their files quietly transferred to the pension program, called one by one to confirm their bank account numbers as though they were ordinary retirees.

Abbas declared pay-to-slay dead in February 2025. The elections commission just filed the death certificate in the recycling bin.

I have spent decades in U.S. federal courts pursuing the financial architecture that keeps terrorism alive — suing Iran, Syria, North Korea, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority itself on behalf of victims and their families, using statutes like the Antiterrorism Act of 1990 and the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 as the legal weapon of choice. The through-line in every case is the same: follow the money, name who pays, make terror too expensive to continue. What the PA elections commission has now handed us is something rare — a self-incriminating document, produced voluntarily, by the very entity that claims to have reformed.

The State Department has already formally determined that the PA shifted its payments to new institutional vehicles to conceal them from Western donors. A senior department official said plainly that "attempts by the Palestinian Authority to conceal payments to relatives of those who have murdered both Americans and Israelis are unacceptable," and that a PA seeking any role in postwar Gaza "must stop these payments immediately." That was May. Here we are in September, and the PA's election rules have confirmed that nothing has stopped — not the payments, and certainly not the contempt for anyone foolish enough to believe Abbas's promises.

The Taylor Force Act, signed in March 2018, was supposed to drain the financial swamp by conditioning U.S. economic assistance to the PA on the cessation of pay-to-slay. Congress meant it as a tourniquet. What the PA did was quietly apply a different bandage, give the wound a new name, and keep bleeding the program forward — all while collecting donor dollars routed through civil service and security-force budgets that escape the Act's strictest triggers.

The elections commission circular strips away the last pretense. The PA does not merely tolerate pay-to-slay; it has institutionalized its recipients as a privileged class. Ordinary Palestinians serve their people through public employment and are told they must sacrifice their livelihoods for the right to seek office. Terrorists who attacked Israelis are excused that sacrifice entirely.

Washington, Brussels, and every capital that has continued writing checks to Ramallah needs to absorb what Taamallah put on the record on September 7, 2026. This is not an allegation from an Israeli government source, not a deduction from a watchdog report — it is the PA's own election bureaucracy, in its own voice, confirming that prisoner stipends continue and that their recipients enjoy rights no PA employee enjoys.

The PA has signed its own confession. The only question now is whether its donors have the will to read it.

Hamas Came to Berlin and Vienna. Europe Is Only Now Reading the Indictment.

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 07:13:48 GMT

Picture a rented storage unit somewhere in Vienna. Inside: five Glock 26 handguns, rounds of ammunition, clothing, equipment. Waiting. It was not a plot Europe stumbled upon by chance. It was a near-miss that should shame every government on this continent that spent years treating Hamas as someone else's problem.

Germany's federal prosecutors have now charged seven men with plotting to carry out coordinated terrorist attacks in Berlin and Vienna timed to the second anniversary of October 7. The targets identified by prosecutors are not abstractions: Israeli diplomats, Jewish community centers, pro-Israel demonstrators. People going about their lives. The plan was for the attacks to land simultaneously or in close succession, a synchronized act of slaughter designed to echo the original massacre and announce that Hamas had arrived in the heart of Europe.

According to Germany's 214-page federal indictment, obtained by the newspaper Welt, the plot had become concrete by at least July 2025. The weapons procurement network was international and deliberate: pistols, a fully automatic rifle, more than 700 rounds of ammunition, moved through Denmark, Germany, and Austria. One cache — a Crvena Zastava assault rifle and eight Glock 26 pistols, over 600 rounds of ammunition — was seized in the courtyard of a residential building on Turmstrasse in Berlin's Moabit district. Three suspects were arrested on October 1, 2025, just six days before the planned attacks, during the handover of that cache. Six days. German domestic intelligence does not deserve a prize for that; it deserves a reckoning.

One of the seven suspects filmed a pre-recorded claim-of-responsibility video in August 2025, threatening revenge attacks across Europe in the name of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas's military wing. He filmed it before the attack, so that it could be released after the blood had been spilled. This is not the improvised fantasy of a lone wolf. This is operational planning by an organization that has been building infrastructure on European soil for years.

The seven men — a German, a Danish national, a Bulgarian, and three Lebanese — did not act alone. Prosecutors allege the weapons operation was coordinated from Lebanon, where a Hamas operative oversaw one of the procurement channels linking members of the network across Europe. The command-and-control structure runs from Beirut to Berlin to Vienna as naturally as if there were no borders at all. For Hamas, there aren't.

This is not a revelation. It is a confirmation of what the first wave of prosecutions already proved. Earlier this year, a Berlin court convicted four men — aged 36 to 58 — for being part of a Hamas-directed network that buried weapons caches in Bulgaria, Denmark, and Poland, and sentenced them to between four and a half and six years in prison. That was landmark: the first time a German court ever convicted Hamas members under Germany's terrorism laws, because, astoundingly, Hamas is still not formally designated as a terrorist organization under German domestic law. The EU designation exists. The U.S. designation exists. Germany has been prosecuting Hamas members as members of a "foreign terrorist organization" — while the organization itself enjoys a legal grey zone that its operatives have exploited with remarkable efficiency.

That grey zone must be closed. Not debated, not studied, not referred to committee. Closed.

And the legal campaign cannot end with criminal prosecutions alone. The men in pretrial detention in Berlin are foot soldiers. The commanders directing them from Lebanon, the financiers in Tehran and Doha whose money funds the weapons procurement networks, the facilitators who move guns through Copenhagen and across the Schengen Area — they must be named, sanctioned, and sued. Germany's domestic intelligence service has itself acknowledged that Hamas and affiliated individuals are attempting to "establish clandestine logistical networks in Germany for procuring weapons and planning attacks". If the intelligence service knows it, the finance ministries of Europe know it too. Freeze the money. Seize the assets. Make the infrastructure too expensive to rebuild.

Shurat HaDin has spent two decades arguing that terror is a business, and that businesses respond to financial pain. The Berlin case proves the business model has gone fully transnational. Hamas's stated objective, according to the indictment, was to move beyond propaganda and fundraising and develop the actual capacity to carry out attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets in the West. They nearly succeeded. The storage unit in Vienna is empty now. The next one may not be found in time.

The Jews of Berlin and Vienna were the intended victims. But European governments are the ones who made the target-rich environment possible by tolerating Hamas's logistical presence for decades, treating it as a political nuisance rather than a terrorist army operating under their feet. Seven men are now charged. The reckoning for those who enabled the infrastructure to exist must come next.

There Is No 'Anti-Zionist Exception' to Civil Rights Law — and Courts Must Stop Inventing One

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:09:21 GMT

Mariano Torres is a janitor. He is Latino. He is not Jewish. On the night of April 29, 2024, masked rioters — armed with hammers, knives and chains — seized Hamilton Hall at Columbia University and trapped him inside. When he refused to stand aside, they screamed at him: "What are you, a Jew-lover?" "Why are you defending them?" His co-worker Lester Wilson, also not Jewish, was told: "You work for the Jews." "You're a Zionist." Both men were physically assaulted and held against their will.

Read that again. Two non-Jewish workers were beaten, detained and pelted with slurs connecting them to Jews — and a federal judge still could not find evidence of anti-Jewish discrimination. Judge Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed their civil rights claims, reasoning that the conspiracy's "only purpose" was to occupy a building until Columbia accepted the protesters' demands, and that anti-Zionist rhetoric constitutes "pure political speech." The slurs were "ugly," she conceded, but they did not, in her telling, prove that harming perceived Jews or their supporters was a goal of the mob.

With respect, that reasoning is a legal fiction dressed up as judicial restraint — and it will get people killed.

Two law professors have now put the problem in writing with the precision it demands. Jon Michaels of UCLA and Matthew Segal of Tufts, writing in a forthcoming Cardozo Law Review essay, argue that courts are manufacturing what they call an "anti-Zionist exception" to civil rights law — a doctrine under which behavior labelled anti-Zionist is presumed, by definition, not to be anti-Jewish. In their words, anti-Zionism has become "a sort of get-out-of-legal-liability-free card." Instead of examining the facts as alleged — the slurs, the weapons, the deliberate targeting of people because they were coded as Jewish allies — the court simply presumed that anti-Zionist rhetoric disproves anti-Jewish animus. That is not legal analysis. That is a conclusion masquerading as a syllogism.

I have spent decades in court on behalf of terror victims. I know what motivated reasoning looks like. And I know what happens when the law carves out an exception for one group's persecutors: the exception grows until the protection disappears entirely.

The judge's logic does not hold even on its own terms. She argued that anti-Zionism cannot establish anti-Jewish discrimination because Jews themselves hold "wildly differing opinions" on Israel's policies. By that reasoning, no slur rooted in a contested political identity could ever establish discriminatory intent. Did the rioters ask Torres which side of the Gaza debate he was on before they pinned him with furniture and called him a "Jew-lover"? Of course not. The slur did the work that slurs always do: it marked the target, coded him as one of them, and made the violence legible to the mob.

This is not a novel legal question. American courts have long understood that discrimination based on perceived membership in a protected group is still discrimination. You do not have to be Black to be targeted for associating with Black people. You do not have to be a woman to be targeted for defending women. The architecture of civil rights law was built precisely to close those gaps — and it worked, for everyone except, apparently, perceived supporters of Jews.

Michaels told JNS that existing civil rights laws are "more than sufficient to fully protect those plaintiffs," and that denying them that protection is "legally unsupportable and bad as a matter of public policy." He is right on both counts. The problem is not that the law is inadequate. The problem is that courts are refusing to apply it.

The Torres v. Carlson case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The Second Circuit must reverse. Not because I say so, and not as a favor to Jewish advocacy organizations. Because the alternative — a two-tiered civil rights regime in which "I was targeting Zionists, not Jews" operates as a complete defense — makes the whole edifice of American anti-discrimination law incoherent. If you can beat a janitor with a chair, call him a "Jew-worker," hold him hostage in a barricaded hall, and walk away without civil liability because your stated politics were anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic, then the law does not protect Jews. It protects everyone else.

Torres and Wilson stood their ground in Hamilton Hall when the mob demanded they step aside. American courts must now stand their ground too. The get-out-of-jail-free card must be torn up, and the Second Circuit has the chance to do it. Jewish blood — and the blood of those who stand with Jews — is not cheaper than anyone else's in this country. Not yet.

"Good Intentions" Is Not a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card for Classroom Antisemitism

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:03:45 GMT

An Advanced Placement U.S. history class at Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach should have been a model of rigorous, balanced education. Instead, a teacher posted supplemental slides on a Google Classroom page — right after a unit on the Holocaust and genocides — asserting that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, with no opposing perspective offered. Jewish students sat in that classroom. They read those slides. They felt, in the words of the California Department of Education, "targeted and bullied, based upon their nationality, race or ethnicity or religion."

The Manhattan Beach Unified School District investigated. It found that the teacher had violated its own policies on teaching controversial subjects. And then — in a maneuver I have seen replicated from university administrators to federal bureaucrats — the district buried the finding. It concluded, with a straight face, that because the teacher didn't intend to discriminate, the materials were not discriminatory, and it took no corrective action. The anti-discrimination framework, in the district's reading, was a matter of motive. If your heart was in the right place, the harm you caused simply did not count.

The California Department of Education has now overturned that conclusion, ruling it "inconsistent with law." Intent is not required to prove discriminatory conduct under the California Education Code. Effect is what the law measures. The state found that the materials created "an intimidating and discriminatory environment" — full stop. It is now requiring the district to retain an outside trainer and implement mandatory antisemitism education for every teacher and administrator at the school by October 26.

Good. But let's be clear about what the district tried to get away with, because it will try again somewhere else under a different name.

The "intent" shield is the oldest trick in the discrimination-defense playbook. You find the most sympathetic possible framing — a well-meaning educator, a sincere pedagogical impulse — and you use it to short-circuit the inquiry before you ever examine what actually happened to the students in the room. It works just often enough to be worth trying. In civil rights litigation I have conducted for over two decades, I have watched defendants deploy it with remarkable consistency: the employer who genuinely believed he was being fair, the landlord who genuinely believed she had other reasons, the school board that genuinely believed its teacher had good intentions. The victims' injuries are no less real for any of it.

California's legislature understood this when it enacted AB 715, which was chaptered into law in October 2025. The bill explicitly established that discriminatory bias in instruction "does not require a showing of direct harm to members of a protected group" and does not require members of a protected group to be present at the moment the biased conduct occurs for the act to qualify as discriminatory. Teachers unions and civil liberties organizations lined up to kill it, predicting catastrophe for free inquiry. A federal judge in Oakland rejected those arguments and dismissed a constitutional challenge brought under the First Amendment.

The opponents had it exactly backwards. There is nothing pedagogically rigorous about presenting a one-sided genocide accusation against the Jewish state to a roomful of teenagers and calling it history. The law does not forbid teachers from discussing Israel, Gaza, or any other contested subject. It requires, as AB 715 specifies, that instruction be factually accurate and free of discriminatory bias. That is the floor of education, not the ceiling of censorship.

The remedy the California Department of Education has ordered is the correct one. Mandatory antisemitism training, external oversight, corrective action with a hard deadline — these are the mechanisms that make the law real rather than aspirational. Emet Legal Services, which filed the appeal on behalf of the South Bay Jewish Advocacy Group, put it precisely: school boards across California cannot "turn a blind eye to classroom bias or defend it under the shield of 'good intentions.'"

That message needs to travel beyond California. In classrooms from New York to Texas, Jewish students have watched teachers use the Gaza conflict as a vehicle to deliver one-sided political advocacy, and administrators have responded with the same cocktail of concern, process, and inaction. The California ruling establishes that you do not get credit for sincerity when the effect of your classroom materials is to make Jewish children feel like targets. Effect, not intent, is the standard. It always should have been.

Every school district in America should read this ruling carefully. The law has teeth. It is time to use them.

Canada Just Handed Iran a $560 Million Bill. Now Comes the Hard Part.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 17:31:58 GMT

On the same morning last week that an Ontario court handed down what may be the largest civil award to an individual in Canadian history — ordering the Islamic Republic to pay $560 million to a man its own agents tortured — a Toronto police constable named Marc Pinizzotto was shot dead while executing a search warrant connected to an Iranian proxy network accused of attacking a U.S. consulate and a synagogue on Canadian soil. The irony is not subtle. While judges deliver verdicts on paper, the ayatollahs answer in bullets.

That collision tells you everything about where we are with Iran in 2026.

The victim at the center of the judgment, Zahed Haftlang, was recruited at 13 as a child soldier in the Iran-Iraq War. Captured by Iraqi forces, he was returned to Iran in 1990, branded an "infidel" for daring to complain about the war, and repeatedly imprisoned and tortured by his own government in an effort to break his will and bind him to the Supreme Leader. He eventually jumped ship from an Iranian cargo vessel in Vancouver's English Bay, swam ashore, and built a life in Canada. For his courage, Ontario Superior Court Justice R. Lee Akazaki awarded him $100 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages, finding that the IRGC's torture of their own citizen — driven by political, religious, and ideological motives — constituted terrorism under Canadian law. Add 36 years of 5 percent annual interest and the total reaches $560 million, a figure that will keep growing at 4 percent per year until the regime pays. The judgment will reportedly be served via email to the Supreme Leader's office.

I have spent decades doing precisely this kind of work in U.S. federal courts. I know the exhilaration of a landmark ruling and I know — in bone-deep, case-hardened detail — what comes next. The gap between a judgment and a dollar collected is where empires of paper go to die.

The Ontario ruling is genuinely significant. The court relied on Canada's Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, which strips Iran of sovereign immunity when its violence is motivated by politics, religion, or ideology — structurally similar to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act exception that Shurat HaDin has used in U.S. federal courts to win judgments against Tehran, Damascus, and Pyongyang. The ruling also breaks new ground: this appears to be the first time a Canadian court has found that Tehran's terrorism exception covers atrocities committed by the Iranian state against its own nationals on home soil. That precedent matters enormously, because the regime's worst brutality has always been directed inward — at its own people, the ones it labels infidels and dissidents and inconvenient witnesses.

Now comes enforcement. Under Canadian law, terrorism victims may seize frozen Iranian non-diplomatic assets held in Canada, and may pursue regime- and IRGC-linked assets abroad. In practice, Iran has ignored every civil proceeding brought against it in Canada and the United States alike. Tehran did not participate in Haftlang's case. It will not write a check. The frozen assets held in Canada are finite, fiercely contested by other judgment creditors, and dwarfed by the cumulative awards piling up in multiple jurisdictions. Overseas, tracing and seizing IRGC-linked assets requires the kind of sustained, coordinated intelligence and legal firepower that no single victim's legal team can sustain alone.

What the Haftlang case demands — and what Western governments have been too timid to supply — is a centralized, cross-border enforcement mechanism: a standing international framework that aggregates terrorism judgments across Canada, the United States, and Europe, maps Iranian sovereign and parastatal assets in every jurisdiction simultaneously, and allows courts in one country to enforce another's terrorism verdicts. Sanctions designations help, but they are not enough. The IRGC has been a listed terrorist organization under Canadian law for years. U.S. prosecutors allege a senior Kata'ib Hezbollah figure directed at least 18 attacks across Europe and two in Canada — including the synagogue attack and the consulate shooting that killed Constable Pinizzotto — while reportedly telling an undercover officer, "In Europe, we have our guys; even in America, for example, the other day, and in Canada we have our guys." That is not a rogue freelancer. That is an operational network, funded and directed by a state, striking Jewish and Western targets at will while its paymaster hides behind sovereign immunity arguments that courts are now, finally, beginning to tear down.

The timing of Thursday's two headlines — landmark judgment in one courtroom, a police officer's funeral being arranged in another — is not coincidence. It is the Islamic Republic's actual answer to accountability: keep the money moving, keep the proxies active, and outlast every court order. Haftlang deserves every cent. Constable Pinizzotto deserved to go home. Western governments owe both men — and the next victims — something more than another paper verdict filed in a drawer.

The mullah regime has always counted on enforcement being harder than adjudication. It is time to prove them wrong. Coordinate the asset seizures. Share the intelligence. Make collection as relentless as the litigation. A $560 million judgment that sits uncollected is not justice. It is a receipt.

A UN Envoy Who Never Looked at the Evidence Just Blacklisted Israel — Here Is Why That Matters

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 17:31:58 GMT

There is a question every court asks before a verdict is entered: did the person making the accusation actually examine the evidence? In any jurisdiction I have ever litigated in — Israeli courts, U.S. federal courts, international tribunals — the answer has to be yes. On May 29, the United Nations answered that question with a brazen no, and almost no one called it what it is: a structural fraud dressed up as a human-rights report.

Pramila Patten, the Secretary-General's special representative on sexual violence in conflict, stood before the UN press corps that day and was asked directly whether she had reviewed the evidence underlying her own report. "No, because this is not my job," she said. "I am a recipient. I compile that information and I present it to the secretary-general." She also confirmed she had refused to visit Israeli detention facilities — even when Israel offered access. Not because access was denied. Because she chose to decline.

That same document, Secretary-General's report S/2026/321, formally blacklisted Israel's armed and security forces — the IDF, the Israel Prison Service including its Keter special forces, and the Police Counter-Terrorism Unit — alongside Hamas. The report claims to have "verified" 31 cases of sexual violence by Israeli security forces against Palestinian detainees in 2025, covering incidents at military camps, prisons and checkpoints. But the lead author of that verdict just told you, under questioning, that she never once looked at the underlying case files with her own eyes.

The word "verified" no longer means what it used to mean.

Now ask yourself why any of this matters beyond the usual diplomatic outrage. It matters because this report does not sit on a shelf. Under Security Council Resolution 2467, the blacklist triggers a cascade of consequences. The report itself recommends that the Security Council consider applying targeted sanctions to parties that have appeared on the list for five or more years without remedial action. It explicitly urges the Council to consider, under Article 13(b) of the Rome Statute, referral of situations to the International Criminal Court where the conduct described appears to have been committed. It bars listed state actors from participating in UN peacekeeping operations. In short: a document Patten herself admits she never verified is the evidentiary predicate for ICC referrals, for sanctions designations, and for institutional exclusion of an ally state. This is how a compiler's desk becomes an instrument of lawfare.

Israel's ambassador Danny Danon stated that Jerusalem submitted evidence, detailed responses, and an invitation for UN representatives to visit and examine the facts on the ground — all of which were declined. Israel's foreign ministry said it had "comprehensively, thoroughly, and unequivocally refuted these allegations" and formally severed all contact with the Secretary-General's office.

The evidentiary rot goes deeper still. One of the anchor cases cited in the report is the Sde Teiman detention facility. The most inflammatory piece of evidence in the Sde Teiman affair — a leaked video purportedly showing abuse — proved inconclusive. A medical opinion found the evidence pointed to a self-inflicted wound, and in April 2026 the indictments against the IDF reservists accused of abuse were withdrawn. The report, dated January to December 2025, nevertheless rested the case on that facility. Patten compiled it without looking. The UN published it anyway.

And then came the cruelest cut. The same report that claimed to "verify" 31 cases against Israeli security forces could not verify a single account of sexual violence given by Israeli hostages — the men and women who survived Hamas captivity in Gaza tunnels and came home to tell the world what was done to them. The report's explanation? Israel denied the UN access to conduct investigations. Israeli First Lady Michal Herzog put it precisely: "If you cannot believe the victims at the start of your report, why should anyone believe the rest of it?"

That asymmetry — evidence reviewed for Palestinian claimants, evidence dismissed for Israeli hostages — is not an accident of process. It is the logic of the institution. I have spent decades watching international bodies weaponize procedural language against Israel and against the survivors we represent at Shurat HaDin. What is new here is the naked candour. The official herself walked up to a microphone and told the world: I did not verify this. I am not required to. The mechanism does not require me to.

She is right about the mechanism. The mechanism is the problem.

Until the UN's reporting on conflict-related sexual violence is bound by the same evidentiary standards that any judge in any actual courtroom would demand — independent review, access to counter-evidence, equal scrutiny of all parties — its blacklists will remain what this one demonstrably is: a political instrument compiled by a self-described recipient who never looked at the file. Donor governments that fund this process, and foreign ministries that cite it in sanctions proceedings and ICC submissions, should be required to answer for that. So should every lawyer who carries this report into a courtroom as if it were evidence.

Jewish blood has a price. So does the truth. The UN just showed it is unwilling to pay either.

The Judge Was Right. The Prosecutors Were the Problem.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 17:31:58 GMT

On the night of January 28, Dan Sohail pulled up to 770 Eastern Parkway — Chabad-Lubavitch's world headquarters in Brooklyn — cleared the security barriers with his hands, and then drove his Honda Accord into the synagogue entrance five times, reversing between each impact to reload. Inside the building, roughly 2,000 worshippers had gathered for Yud Shevat, one of the most sacred dates on the Chabad calendar — the 75th anniversary of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson assuming leadership of the movement. The doors were knocked off their hinges. No one died. Only a structural post between the two entrance doors stopped the car from going straight into the shul.

Judge Eric N. Vitaliano then sentenced Sohail to time served plus seven days. The Crown Heights community erupted. The condemnations came quickly and loudly, and they were entirely understandable. But the fury is aimed at the wrong address.

The judge told the truth from the bench. "A property crime is what was charged here. Not a hate crime," Vitaliano said, adding that he was "saddened" that the government wanted him to sentence based on "the general misunderstanding of the public." His hands were tied — legally, correctly, and entirely because of what prosecutors chose to put in the indictment.

That is where the real scandal lives.

The U.S. Department of Justice had a federal hate-crime statute ready to use. 18 U.S.C. § 247 — the Church Arson Prevention Act — prohibits intentionally damaging religious real property because of its religious character. It was written precisely for attacks on synagogues, churches and mosques. Sohail drove a car into a synagogue, on one of the holiest days of the year, while two thousand Jews were inside. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York looked at that set of facts and charged him with damaging religious property — the baseline count — without the hate-crime enhancement that would have opened the door to a genuinely deterrent sentence.

When JNS asked the government why it made that choice, spokesman John Marzulli gave the answer that infuriates every victim's family I have ever sat across from: "We don't make statements about charging decisions. Those are internal deliberations." Translation: the most consequential decision in this prosecution — the one that pre-determined the sentence — will never be explained to the community that was targeted.

I have heard variations of that line in courtrooms and government offices for thirty years. It never gets less insulting.

The defense argued, not without some supporting documentation, that Sohail was in the grip of severe mental illness — PTSD and a personality disorder — and that his attack was "an irrational cry for help" rather than ideological hatred. I am not here to render a verdict on what was inside his head. That is precisely the point. Federal law does not require prosecutors to prove that a defendant woke up that morning with a manifesto. The statute requires that the property be targeted because of its religious character. A man who removes security barriers, drives into a synagogue five times on a major Jewish holiday, and was known to have had connections to that very Chabad community — that is a charging decision a serious prosecutor can make and defend.

They did not make it. The state hate-crime charges that were initially filed were dropped the moment Sohail entered his federal guilty plea. He walked away owing $19,000 in restitution — less than the cost of a mid-range used car — and a referral to mental health treatment.

This is not an isolated failure of nerve. The FBI's 2025 hate crime data, released by the ADL, recorded 1,528 anti-Jewish hate crime incidents — 63 percent of all religion-based hate crimes in the United States, from a community representing roughly 2 percent of the American population. The ADL noted that 2025 was "the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks in the Jewish diaspora in more than three decades." The prosecutors in Brooklyn were aware of this context. At sentencing, they themselves told the court that 80 of 146 hate crime incidents across New York City since the start of the year had targeted Jews and Jewish institutions. They cited the epidemic in their own sentencing memorandum. Then they asked a judge to remedy, through sentencing, a gap they had created through charging.

Yaacov Behrman, the Chabad liaison who was inside 770 that night, put the larger truth plainly: "Beyond this individual case, I am deeply concerned about the broader message the sentence sends, particularly at a time when Jewish people face growing danger around the world." He is right about the message. But the message was written the day the indictment was filed, not the day the sentence was handed down.

When a car rams a synagogue packed with two thousand worshippers on one of the most sacred dates of the Jewish year, the government owes that community more than a property charge and a closed file. At a minimum, it owes them an explanation. They will get neither. That silence, and what it signals to the next person contemplating an attack on a Jewish institution, is the real sentence being served here.

The ICC fired its prosecutor for misconduct. The warrants he weaponized must go next.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 17:31:58 GMT

On July 24, the International Criminal Court's 125-member Assembly of States Parties did something that had never been done in the court's 24-year history: it voted, by a large majority, to remove its chief prosecutor from office. Karim Khan — the British barrister who made himself famous by pursuing arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant — was ousted for "serious misconduct and serious breach of duty." The court's oversight body found he had engaged in a sexual relationship with a junior female lawyer on his staff and tried to prevent her from pursuing her allegations against him.

I have spent my career arguing that institutions matter only as much as the integrity of the people running them. The ICC just proved the point — badly.

Let me be precise about what the record now shows, because precision matters here more than outrage. According to documents seen by the Associated Press, Khan engaged in a sexual relationship with the woman and tried to prevent her from pursuing her allegations. The oversight body concluded that given the power imbalance between the prosecutor and his junior staffer, "a sexual relationship could never be appropriate." Khan has steadfastly denied wrongdoing throughout — but the Assembly of States Parties voted to remove him anyway, and the court's oversight body, the Assembly of States Parties, concluded that Khan had committed "serious misconduct and serious breach of duty," said its president, Päivi Kaukoranta.

Now here is the part that cannot be overlooked. The Wall Street Journal — as reported by JNS — reported that Khan asked the complainant to withdraw her allegations so that he could proceed with seeking the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. According to her own UN testimony, he told her: "Think about the Palestinian arrest warrants." The man who positioned himself as the avenging sword of international justice against the Jewish state was, by this account, using that same prosecution as a private silencing tool — dangling it before a woman he had harmed to keep her quiet.

I have litigated terror cases in U.S. federal courts for decades. I know what prosecutorial integrity requires. It is not optional. It is not decorative. A prosecution built on evidence gathered under the direction of a prosecutor who allegedly leveraged that very prosecution to suppress a victim's complaint is a prosecution the court should be ashamed of — not proud of.

The ICC's defenders will say the warrants stand regardless of Khan. They are technically correct: Khan's removal will have no immediate impact on the 2024 arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, which can only be withdrawn by ICC judges. That answer is legally neat and morally evasive. The prosecution of sitting leaders of a democratic state — the first time the court has ever pursued warrants against a Western ally — was driven personally by a man whom his own institution has now found committed serious misconduct and serious breach of duty. The warrants were not generated by some neutral algorithmic process. They were the product of choices made by this specific prosecutor, who by the record was simultaneously abusing a staff member and reportedly dangling those same warrants to silence her.

The United States understood something about Karim Khan before the ICC's own member states caught up. Washington sanctioned Khan and more than a dozen other ICC staff in response to the court's overreach against Israel and American personnel. Critics called those sanctions an assault on international justice. What do they call them now? The prosecutor Washington identified as unfit for his position has been confirmed as unfit by his own institution. The U.S. was right.

This is not a moment for schadenfreude. There is a junior female lawyer who came to the ICC to serve international justice and was instead, according to the findings, subjected to a sexual relationship she could not meaningfully consent to within that power structure — and then allegedly pressured to stay silent so that her abuser's most headline-grabbing prosecution could proceed. She deserves to have her testimony taken seriously. The Assembly at last did. It should have acted faster.

For Israel, the practical question is now acute. Netanyahu and Gallant carry arrest warrants issued in 2024 that were personally championed by a prosecutor his own institution has since fired for abusing his power and the trust of a junior staff member. The ICC's incoming leadership faces a choice: conduct a genuine review of how those warrants were initiated, or live with the credibility damage of warrants stamped with Khan's fingerprints. "Political considerations have been folded into this," Utrecht University researcher Iva Vukusic told the AP, "especially as it is the first time a prosecutor has pursued warrants against a Western ally."

The ICC was built on the premise that no one is above the law. Karim Khan clearly believed he was. The Assembly proved him wrong on July 24.

Now the court must prove that principle applies to the warrants he left behind.

Dublin's Showpiece Ban Is a Legal Fiction Dressed as Principle

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 17:31:58 GMT

Last Tuesday, Ireland's Dáil passed the Israeli Settlements (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill — the first comprehensive import ban on goods from Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria enacted by any EU member state. Dublin calls it a principled act of international-law compliance. I call it a political performance built on a legal fiction — one that could rewrite the rules for how Western democracies single out the Jewish state.

Let us be precise about what Ireland actually did. The bill's stated purpose, as the Jerusalem Post reported, is to fulfill Ireland's "international legal obligation, as identified by the International Court of Justice in its advisory opinion of 19 July 2024". That advisory opinion declared Israel's presence in Judea and Samaria, eastern Jerusalem and Gaza illegal under international law. Critically, an ICJ advisory opinion is not a binding judgment. It carries no enforcement mechanism under the UN Charter. No court ordered Ireland to pass this bill. Dublin chose to treat a non-binding legal opinion as a domestic mandate — and that choice, not the opinion itself, is the act for which it must answer.

The economics expose the exercise for what it is. Irish imports from Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria totaled less than €1 million between 2020 and 2024 — fruit, vegetables, timber. The JTA put 2024 imports alone at roughly €200,000. This is not a trade measure. It is a normative signal — a legislative declaration that Israeli civilians living beyond the 1949 Green Line are a category of economic untouchables, to be excluded by statute.

The double standard is glaring, and it is not subtle. The EU has spent years negotiating — and re-negotiating — trade preferences for goods produced in Morocco's occupied Western Sahara, a territory Rabat has administered by military force since 1975. The Court of Justice of the EU annulled successive EU-Morocco trade agreements for violating the self-determination rights of the Sahrawi people — and in October 2025 the EU and Morocco simply revised the deal and kept trading, with critics noting the new arrangement did not meaningfully comply with the Court's own instructions. No EU member state rushed to enact a unilateral import ban on Moroccan-origin products from Western Sahara. No Irish Dáil bill cited Sahrawi self-determination as a domestic legal obligation. The zeal for "international law compliance" is not universal — it is selective, and the selection points in one direction.

The United States noticed. In June, the U.S. State Department warned that the proposed legislation amounted to "unhelpful virtue-signaling" that "does not serve the cause of peace in the Middle East, help feed Gazans or work toward the outcomes Ireland says it seeks." Washington went further: American officials warned the bill could fuel antisemitism, encourage those seeking renewed conflict in Gaza and complicate operations for U.S. companies operating in Ireland. Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin acknowledged the concern was real enough to shape the bill's final scope — he told RTÉ that extending the ban to services "would perhaps potentially damage Ireland more than anybody else, in terms of potential impacts on U.S. multinationals based here". So Dublin calibrated its virtue precisely to the point where it cost Dublin nothing.

Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar called the legislation "antisemitic" and warned Ireland would "pay a price" if it became law. I am not here to divine individual legislators' motives. The antisemitism argument is structural, not psychological. When the entire legislative apparatus of an EU state singles out one national group — Israeli civilians in a defined territory — for economic exclusion, while the same apparatus extends or accommodates trade preferences for every other contested-territory producer on earth, the pattern is discriminatory on its face. That is not a question of what any Irish TD felt in his heart. It is a question of what the law does in practice.

The bill now heads to the Seanad and is expected to be signed into law before the Irish parliament's summer recess. When it passes, Ireland will have handed every hostile government in Europe a template: take an ICJ advisory opinion, declare it a domestic legal obligation, and legislate accordingly — targeting Israel and only Israel. Spain has already implemented its own import restrictions on settlement goods. The left-wing opposition in the Dáil argued the ban does not go far enough and pushed amendments to include services. The direction of travel is unmistakable.

Washington and Brussels need to understand what this precedent enables. When states begin legislating from selective advisory opinions aimed at one country, the fiction of neutral international-law compliance collapses. What remains is economic collective punishment — dressed in the language of the rule of law, but operating as its antithesis.

The Irish bill will not move a single kilogram of fruit or timber. It will move the line. And once it moves, the next bill will start from the new position.